Christmas Shopping

How to Eliminate the Frustration of Christmas Shopping

Christmas time should be a joyful, happy time…right? Well it is for me now. But it didn’t use to be. For years I used to dread that time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was the time when I had to do the dreaded Christmas shopping. Driving through what seemed like rush hour traffic to get to the malls, only to find my parking spot so far away, I might as well walked from home. Then fighting the crowds of crazy people (people who certainly seem sane the rest of the year), for that one special item the store never seems to have enough of, only to finally get to the checkout and find that the cashier is only working part time during this joyous season and hasn’t really been trained on how to process my 10% off coupon that I so desperately want to use.


Maybe your shopping experiences have been different, but mine seemed to always be about the same, until my AHA moment day! That is the day I decided to start doing the bulk of my Christmas shopping online. I have been shopping online since before shopping online was cool, or safe or secure or fast. (Can’t believe I used to shop without a high-speed connection.) At first I was very resistant to doing my actual buying online.

I would use the internet to research the things I was interested in buying, but then I would hop in the car and go to the mall and actually make the purchase. I won’t tell you how long it took for the light bulb to go on, but just suffice it to say that one day I had the AHA moment. It was the moment that I realized how much it was actually costing me to NOT shop online. My AHA moment came one day about fifteen years ago. I was doing my “very slow” research to see where I could find the cheapest price for a new pillow for my bed. My old one was just worn out and I needed to replace it. The moment came as I sat there looking at the NEW sears.com website where they listed a Jumbo Down-Filled Pillow for $6.97 and I noticed that they would ship it to my house for an additional $4.95. That’s a total less than $12.

All of a sudden the light bulb came on. I realized that if I drove the thirty miles to Sears to buy that pillow (as I always had), it would cost me $6.97 plus about $5.00 worth of gas, plus about two hours of my time plus of course all the little items I would pick up while I’m out (I think they call them impulse buys), plus the topper on the cost of the pillow, the almost-required food court stop for a $4 strawberry smoothie. AHA! I could stay home and in 15 minutes or less, I could buy my pillow and have it shipped to my house for a ton less than hopping in the car and going to get it. From that moment on, I became a super online shopper. Now every Christmas I look for the websites that give FREE shipping around the holidays and I get my shopping done in no time at a fraction of the former cost.

Now if I go to the mall, it is to just sit and relax and watch the hurried shoppers go by. And yes, I still get my smoothie, but now it just seems to taste sweeter.! For a few of my online shopping ideas for this Christmas feel free to stop over at www.RodneysChristmasGiftIdeas.com Have a happy shopping season.